1. Financial Inclusion: I have no idea what your priors are about financial inclusion, but I think it still matters a lot and you'll be seeing more about that from me in the faiV and elsewhere in coming months. The best way to update your priors on the state of financial inclusion is the Global Findex of course. I've been including things in drips and drabs, but Sonja Kelly and Beth Rhyne of CFI have now published their reasonably comprehensive look at the data, complete with lots of charts, available for everyone (and Sonja definitely deserves a vacation after all her work on this and the Gallup data).CFI is certainly onboard with the theme of updating priors. The title of the report is "Financial Inclusion Hype vs. Reality" and the Introduction invites you to "Recalibrate." The big message is that despite growth in account ownership, there's no growth in usage and lots of troubling signs, like falling savings rates. You can feel the exasperation in the report, an exasperation that I generally share, given what seems to be a general fatigue around financial inclusion. These data don't in any way support the idea that it's time to move on from financial inclusion. But I'm less concerned than Sonja and Beth about the growing gap between access and usage. Consumer banking does have network effects--value of usage increases rapidly with the number of other users--but those effects take time. The population being served was never likely to be heavy users, which increases the time before network effects surface and become self-reinforcing. So it makes sense to me that as we get better at access, the gap between access and usage should grow for a while.One place I'm not updating my priors based on this data is showcased in their Figure 6, illustrating that rapid growth in digital payments is not showing up in borrowing or savings. I've always been puzzled by the idea that making it easier for people to spend was going to boost savings. Given that the empirics in Findex aren't very encouraging on progress in financial inclusion, here's a new paper from Besley, Burchardi and Ghatak laying out the benefits of inclusion. The most interesting thing about it is how well it aligns with what we've been seeing on general equilibrium effects of microcredit--it raises wages for the average worker. That's bad for impact evaluations, but good for more people and a powerful reason to continue investing in inclusion.